The Body: The Key Concepts

191 Pages·2021·4.045 MB·English

by  Lisa Blackman

The Body
Thoroughly updated and revised throughout with brand new chapters on
affective bodies, indeterminate bodies, assemblaged bodies and a new con-
clusion, and featuring essay and classroom questions for classroom use, The
Body: Key Concepts, Second Edition, presents a concise and up-to-date
introduction to, and analysis of, the complex and influential debates around
the body in contemporary culture. Lisa Blackman outlines and illuminates
those debates which have made the body central to current interdisciplinary
thinking across the arts, humanities and sciences. Since body studies hit the
mainstream, it has grown in new regions, including China, and movedin new
directions to question what counts as a body and what it means to have and
be abody in different contexts, milieu and settings. Lisa Blackman guides the
reader through socio-cultural questions around representation, performance,
class, race, gender, disability and sexuality to examine how current thinking
about the body has developed and been transformed. Blackman engageswith
classic anthropological scholarship from Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Mar-
garet Lock, revisits black feminist writings from the 1980s, as well as enga-
ging with recent debates, thought and theorists who are inventing new
concepts, methods and ways of apprehending embodiment which challenge
binary and dualistic categories. It provides an overviewof the proliferation of
body studies into other disciplines, including media and cultural studies, phi-
losophy, gender studies and anthropology, as well as mapping the future of
body studies at the intersections of body and affect studies.
Lisa Blackman is Professor in the Department of Media, Communications
and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths University in London, UK.

The Body
The Key Concepts
Second Edition
Lisa Blackman
Secondeditionpublished2021
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AcataloguerecordforthisbookisavailablefromtheBritishLibrary
LibraryofCongressCataloging-in-PublicationData
Names:Blackman,Lisa,1965-author.
Title:Thebody:thekeyconcepts/LisaBlackman.
Description:Secondedition.|Abingdon,Oxon;NewYork,NY:
Routledge,2021.|Includesbibliographicalreferencesandindex.
Identifiers:LCCN2020056616(print)|LCCN2020056617(ebook)|
ISBN9781350109452(hardback)|ISBN9781350109414(paperback)|
ISBN9781003087892(ebook)
Subjects:LCSH:Humanbody--Socialaspects.|Humanbody(Philosophy)|
Bodyimage--Socialaspects.|Humanphysiology.|Identity(Psychology)
Classification:LCCHM636.B552021(print)|LCCHM636(ebook)|
DDC306.4--dc23
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LCebookrecordavailableathttps://lccn.loc.gov/2020056617
ISBN:978-1-350-10945-2(hbk)
ISBN:978-1-350-10941-4(pbk)
ISBN:978-1-003-08789-2(ebk)
TypesetinTimesNewRoman
byTaylor&FrancisBooks
Contents
Introduction: Thinking through the body 1
Beyond binaries 2
Anthropology of the body 6
The problem of dualism 8
The problem of the body as substance 9
The body as an ‘absent present’ 10
The transdisciplinarity of ‘body studies’ 11
Horse–human relations 12
The affective body 14
Chapter 1: Bodily Matters 15
Chapter 2: Affective bodies 16
Chapter 3: Bodies and difference 16
Chapter 4: Lived bodies 17
Chapter 5: Bodily assemblages 17
Conclusion: Indeterminate bodies 17
1 Bodily matters 19
Introduction 19
The sociological and anthropological body 21
The naturalistic body 24
The materialist body 27
The socially constructed body 30
Fear, fetish and phobia 30
The micro and the macro 31
The disciplined body 33
Agency and the body 37
The somatically felt body 39
Uses of anger 41
Naturally queer 43
Conclusion 46
vi Contents
2 Affective bodies 47
Introduction 47
Affect studies 48
Social influence 51
Becoming (horse–human) 53
The feeling body 55
Emotional labour 56
Racialization and emotional labour 58
Public Feeling 60
Emotional contagion 63
Self-containment and othering 64
Affective transmission 66
The vitalist body 67
The networked body 69
Transcorporeality 70
Racism as a technology of affect 70
Conclusion 71
3 Bodies and difference 72
Introduction 72
Bodily markers of respectability 73
Corporeal capital 74
Feelings and bodily dispositions 75
Bodily affectivity 76
Body image to body without an image 78
Fabulousness and werking ‘the look’ 79
Throwing like a girl 80
Beyond the binary (sex and gender) 82
Corporeal feminism 83
Gender performativity 85
Becoming or unpredictable potential(s) 86
Able-ism and non-normative morphologies 87
New materialism 88
Conclusion 91
4 Lived bodies 92
Introduction 92
Sensory bodies 94
Touch 96
Skin knowledge 97
Contents vii
Digital skins 98
Taste 99
The mouth 100
The mouth and taste 102
Abjection 104
Abjection and racism 106
Smell 106
The articulated body 108
Health, illness and bodily matters 109
Migrant bodies 111
Self-health 112
Cancer cultures 113
Narratives and bodily matters 116
Morphological imagination: Cripping and queering theories 116
Living with autoimmunity, or shit happens 118
Conclusion 119
5 Bodily assemblages 120
Introduction 120
Process 121
The body-in-movement 122
Bodies without organs 125
Mixed natures 127
Racializing assemblages 129
New materialist assemblages 130
Sociality and historicity of indeterminacy 131
Queer assemblages 132
Actor network theory 135
Doing hypoglycaemia 137
The body multiple 138
Companion species and multispecies ethnographies 140
Conclusion: Enacted materialities 142
Conclusion: Indeterminate bodies 143
Introduction: Imagining the future of body studies within the
academy 143
1 Affective bodies 146
2 Immaterial bodies 147
3 Biomediation and necropolitics 149
4 Indeterminate bodies 150
Conclusion 152
viii Contents
Questions for essays and classroom discussion 154
Introduction 154
1 Bodily matters 154
2 Affective bodies 154
3 Bodies and difference 155
4 Lived bodies 155
5 Bodily assemblages 155
6 Imaging the future of the body within the academy 156
Annotated guide for further reading 156
161
Bibliography
Index 180
Introduction
Thinking through the body
With developments in the medical, life and biological sciences, there are
now numerous examples of bodies that challenge the assumption that there
is anything natural or timeless about the body, or what it means to be
embodied. Nikolas Rose (2007) in his book, The Politics of Life Itself: Bio-
medicine, Power and Subjectivity, invites us to consider the status of the
human within the context of cloning and specifically a cloned child. In his
response to this question, he suggests that cloning produces a biotechnolo-
gically constructed baby signalling how body-world-technology relations
and practices are remaking what we take the human to be. The human
body, within this example, is not a discrete stable category or ‘thing’ but is
always made and remade through new bodily configurations or assemblages
of human and non-human elements. This enmeshing of the human and the
more-than-human challenges clear-cut and discrete distinctions between
inside and outside, human and technological, self and other, and the carbon
and synthetic. The question of whether there is anything natural about the
human body, encapsulated in the concept of human nature, has been dis-
placed to a focus on how bodies are always entangled with environments,
producing different kinds of bodies and arguably ways of being human.
However, we might also be cautious about the newness of the present that is
ofteninvokedinsomeaccountsanalysingtheco-productionandco-constitutionof
life.SimoneBrowne’s(2015)book,DarkMatters:OntheSurveillanceofBlackness,
cogently shows how much longer histories of the surveillance of black bodies,
including the material practices of branding slaves as part of the brutalizing
Atlanticslavetrade,arecontinuedwithinbiometricassemblageswhichperpetuate
longer histories of racialization in new forms. What she calls the ‘prototypical
whiteness’ofthesepracticesproducesandreproducesso-called‘truths’aboutblack
bodies based on cultural and scientific myths, that are re-embedded within new
technologiesofseeing.Althoughtheproductionofracialdifferencesthroughthese
technologiesmakesmorevisibletheculturesofinequalityandoppressionthatthey
keepalive,theintransigenceofracializedformsofsurveillancecontinuesystemsfor
cataloguing and differentiating bodies according to discriminatory and racist
logics.Thistensionbetweentheindeterminacyofourmixednatures,andthereality
oftheregulationofparticularbodies,isonethatlinkscolonialaccountsofhuman